29Jan15

Twitter has a big problem.

I have been an enthusiastic user of Twitter since joining in March 2008. In almost 7 years I have posted almost 53000 Tweets and grown a considerable “audience” of Followers. I have told many people over the years how Twitter, more than any other medium, helped me grow my agency. We can draw a direct line between a handful of early key clients who contacted me either via Twitter or because Twitter.

I can even trace over $1 million in agency revenue to one Tweet I made back in 2009 (you’ll have to meet me in person to hear the whole story).

Twitter was a natural extension of this blog, which is why my personal Twitter account shares the same name. I would post content to the blog, share it out via Twitter, drive traffic back to the blog and start a conversation. It was great and it worked a treat. I loved it.

26Nov14

via media release

Producing and distributing engaging content, and measuring the effectiveness of that content, are the top challenges faced by Australian marketers, according to a new study from the Content Marketing Institute, conducted in partnership with The Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA) and sponsored by Brightcove (NASDAQ: BCOV).

The study outlined that more than half of Australian marketers employ content marketing strategies and place a high importance on being able to create more engaging, visual content and optimising content for their target audience.

The study also showed that 46% of marketers believe that ROI measurement was an immediate and important criteria to address, identifying a wide variety of parameters they believe are essential for ROI measurement. Australian marketers measure the effectiveness of a content marketing program through changes in website traffic (60%), higher conversion rates (46%), changes in their sales efforts (46%), shifts in SEO ranking (39%) and assessing the time their customers spent on site (38%).

20Nov14

If you’re in the process of planning future marketing for your organisation it is handy to understand where things are heading in the fast-moving marketing world. That’s why Wheelhouse Advisors have made this infographic on marketing predictions for 2015 relying heavily on market and customer data.

10Jul14

For many people the idea of being a social media manger is a dream job, and certainly one that wasn’t even considered a decade ago. But as the web becomes even more reliant on social networks, where content is abundant, and competition for attention is extremely fierce, how do social media experts utilise their time and skills to get the best results?

This infographic from the teams at Column 5 and Socialcast attempts to depict a day in the life of a social media manager. Some of the data is US-centric but interesting nonetheless.

27Jun14

These days, with so much data available and easily accessible, choosing the right type of metric to monitor can be daunting for marketers. Quite often I see marketers who are too engrossed in focusing on “vanity” metrics rather than analyzing data that can actually make a difference to their business. And this applies equally to the most important metric of all – revenue.

This infographic from Digital Marketing Philippines lists the key metrics to focus on when reviewing a digital marketing campaign. I like that they focus on the big 3: traffic, conversion, revenue.

14Apr14

As the excellent 60’s era ad agency drama Mad Men enters it’s final season (actually two half seasons), it seems a good time to share these “Moments of Marketing Wisdom” from fictitious advertising guru Don Draper. This infographic by Glow Media captures some of the show’s pearls of wisdom over the years.

8Apr14

The dirty little secret of the recruitment industry is that finding a job is really more about networking with the right people than applying for countless advertised jobs. In fact, most jobs are not even advertised. Therefore, the value of networking becomes extremely high.

He also claims that candidates who are “referred to a hiring manager by a trusted person is 50-100x more likely” to get an interview and get hired than those who simply submit a resume to a posted job. The referred person also has the advantage of being considered for jobs not publicly posted.

That’s where LinkedIn can help.

Networking, and the ease of doing so, is one of the primary features that makes professional social networking site LinkedIn.com so different from the countless run-of-the-mill job boards. They’ve leveraged the concept of “six degrees of separation” — the theory that everyone in the world is connected to each other through relationships, with at most six degrees (connections) of separation. To connect with one person in particular, you just need to find at most 5 other people in a relationship chain to connect with the intended person.

Here is how and why you should use the power of LinkedIn referrals to increase your employment prospects.

19Dec13

As the year winds down it is time to start thinking about 2014 and what it might bring in the shape of marketing trends and developments. The team at Responsys decided to tap some of the smartest minds in the industry to get a feel for what digital marketing will look like in the year ahead.

Interestingly, you’ll find that everyone is reasonably well aligned about where marketing is headed: in order to succeed, marketers must provide individual experiences for their customers. And to do this well and at scale, marketers must orchestrate their communications based on customer data like preferences, behavior and profile information.

10Dec13

In years gone by marketing was fairly simple; just interrupt a large audience with advertising. If it was creative and resulted in extra buzz it was a bonus. If was just your typical hard sell and got enough attention it could increase sales.

But then the digital age arrived, and with it came a tidal wave of entertainment and communication options. Suddenly that large audience was fragmented, niched and massively distracted. Suddenly that large audience had options and could bypass your advertising.

Suddenly your potential customer was being exposed to more marketing messages on more media that at any time in history. Welcome to the age of the distracted consumer.

A new infographic from Responsys shows just how distracted today’s consumer is. Today brands need to design campaigns to cut through the noise and capture the attention of their target audience – or risk their messages being missed.

To me, the following statistics demonstrate both the challenge and the opportunity for marketers. Yes, consumers are being inundated with marketing messages, but they are also highly receptive to well crafted messages from brands they have opted to follow or engage with. Its what inbound marketing is built upon.

The question is….what are you doing to cut through the marketing noise?

Digital Marketing Consultant

Craig Wilson a leading digital marketing, SEO and social media consultant with a passion for effective inbound marketing. He is managing director of Sticky, a digital agency based in Newcastle, Australia that has evolved to encompass:

Media Hunter is a forum for exploring modern media, marketing and start-ups and how and these rapidly evolving areas affect the media, marketers and consumers.

Craig is a contributor to the collaborative series of world-wide marketing books The Age of Conversation 1, 2, 3. He contributes to Marketing Magazine and Digital Ministry and is often called on by media to comment on industry news. Craig is regularly invited to speak on media issues, especially social and digital media, at various events around Australia. He was a speaker / panelist at the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Media and Broadcasting Congress and has addressed conferences for some of Australia's leading organisations on topics ranging from Search Engine Optimisation, the changing media and marketing landscape and inbound marketing.